Truck Lot Boys And Hula-Hoops

We were truck lot boys. We played often in the cinder covered lot across the street where they parked semi trailers, backed up a against railroad ties. The trailers were parked in the form of a U bordered by Pumpilio’s garage on Huron, the elebvated Soo Line, the furniture factory, where they made office desks, and the brick two flat where Yudock lived on the first floor and Angelo on the second.

Next to the two-flat was a four-foot deep ditch littler with rubble from another brick building and years of accumulated trash and broken glass from half pints. There was room to walk between the ditch and the trailers. The trailers stopped just beyond the house. The ditch opened to the lower, grass sparse back lots behind the two-flats on that side of the street.

Behind the first two flat just down the slope was a little shed with the fifty-gallon drum where Yudock’s Mother chopped scrap wood. The grassy area ran fifty yards to the back of a furniture factory. Back in the corner of the truck lot by the factory, a two bay viaduct led to the street on the other side of the Soo Line.

There was also room to walk between Pumpilio’s high brick wall and the back end of the semis, a secret canyon path we often took through the truck lot when we were up to no good, we didn’t want to be seen, or were looking for a trailer that’s been broken into. One time we found one full of hula-hoops, the regular size, and the smaller. They appeared on the street gradually at first, a kid from the block here, one there.

“Where did you get that?” parents asked.

“I found it in the truck lot.” Technically true. We were little Catholic kids, skilled at bending the truth, leaving out details that would only complicate. Besides, it was a poor industrial neighborhood. Certain items, end tables, couches, console stereos, sometime “fell off the truck” and ended up in our living rooms.

The hula hoops, green, purple, orange, multi colored, multiplied, one little girl spinning three around her waist, another topping her, adding small ones around the arms. Pretty soon it became a contest to see who could spin the most at once, ten fifteen kids out, spinning as many or more hula hoops, some with so many going you could barely see the kid doing the spinning.

We became inventive. We played hula-hoop toss. We chased each other and used them a lassos. We swung each other around with them. We cut them apart, tied them in knots, used them as ropes and whips. We grew bored with them.

Pieces of them started to appear everywhere, in the gutter and gang ways, on the sidewalks and the truck lot to be run over by the semis, ground into the cinders until everywhere you looked were tiny little pieces of plastic mixed in, returned to the truck from where they came.